‘The Crossroads’ by Kulbhushan Warikoo traces the Xinjiang links

Manoj Joshi

AN expert on Himalayan and Central Asian studies, Prof Kulbhushan Warikoo has taught for over 30 years at Jawaharlal Nehru University and authored nearly two dozen books. He is also the founder-editor of a quarterly journal, ‘Himalayan and Central Asian Studies’.

India’s geopolitical perspectives can only be understood if you view the subcontinent from its oceanic and continental standpoint. If the peninsula is the body of India flanked by the seas, Jammu and Kashmir is its head jutting into Central Asia. This is a region which is exotic even today, featuring high mountain chains like the Pamirs, Karakoram and the Hindu Kush and where empires run by the Sakas and Hunas reigned. Cities like Khotan, Kashgar, Balkh and Bamiyan were key nodes of the Silk Route. Buddhism, taking off from Kashmir, played a major role in this vast area before the advent of Islam.

Unfortunately, Partition has splintered that vision and the post-Partition history of India and Pakistan has seriously undermined the role these successor states can play in Eurasia. Today, the key entities of Gilgit and Baltistan are parts of Pakistan and Ladakh, shorn off Aksai Chin, is an Indian Union Territory, as is Jammu and Kashmir. They face the huge and still turbulent Chinese province of Xinjiang, peopled by the Uyghurs.

What could have been comes out through this book’s account of pre-Partition Jammu and Kashmir and the role of its constituents, especially Ladakh — which functioned as the entrepot of India-Xinjiang trade.

Warikoo has provided details of the trade that took place in this area, involving wool, gold dust, silver, marijuana, resin (charas), silk cloth and raw silk, felt and carpets imported from Xinjiang. Indian exports using the Leh-Yarkand route were tea, indigo, dyes, paints, muslin, brocades, velvet, Kashmiri shawls, cotton goods, goats and otter skins, furs, sugar, spices, indigenous medicines, coral and so on. Opium produced in Kishtwar and Bushahr was also exported to Xinjiang, despite the ban on its importation.

The writer has provided us with an overview of the diplomatic and military activity in the region in the mid to late 19th century and the ups and downs of the Qing Empire’s fortunes in Xinjiang. Among the more interesting developments from the side of J&K was the consolidation of the authority of Maharaja Gulab Singh first on behalf of the Sikh Empire and then as an independent ruler under British suzerainty. The book provides details on the relationship between J&K and Kashgaria despite British efforts “to erode the Dogra Maharaja’s political influence outside the borders of Jammu and Kashmir”.

The book also illustrates the ‘Great Game’ played out by Britain, China and Russia and the manner in which British imperial policy enabled China to expand south of the Kun Lun range, which they had once themselves acknowledged as their border, at the cost of the claims of the Jammu and Kashmir state. The British discouraged the princely state over which they had paramountcy from claiming the territory to the Kun Lun mountains and maintaining their outpost at Shahidulla (Xiadulla).

A great value of the book is that it has brought out several salient issues of our period such as the Sino-Pak boundary agreement through which J&K lost thousands of square kilometres of territory in the Raksam, Shaksgam and Taghdumbash Pamir. The writer also provides an account of the origins and course of the Karakoram Highway project which has now merged into the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) scheme.

If there is one weakness of the book, it is that there are no maps. A subject such as the one that the writer has taken on refers to places that may be familiar to him, but not the average reader, especially since over the century, names and international boundaries have changed. Even so, this is a useful and informative work.